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'Titanfall' Max Player Count Capped At 6 vs 6, Which Is Just Fine

Titanfall is one of the most highly anticipated games of 2014. But recent news has some gamers upset.

Yesterday, developer Respawn boss Vince Zampella tweeted that the player cap has been set at 6 vs. 6 plus AI, which includes both bots and the titular Titans.

“6v6 is max player count,” Zampella tweeted. “Turned out to be the best balance with AI for us.”

Zampella attributes the decision not to anything technical but rather to the fun factor. With twelve players, twelve Titans, and other AI all on-screen, the game is hectic enough, and 6 vs. 6 keeps the matches well-balanced.

But the internet isn’t entirely convinced. After all, isn’t more better?

Not necessarily, according to Titanfall producer Drew McCoy, who stopped by NeoGaf to put fears to rest.

Twelve players won’t make for empty maps, according to McCoy, who says that for the “amount of stuff happening at once in a map you’ll be hard pressed to find a game that keeps the action higher. I literally have to stop playing every few rounds because my heart just can’t take it some times. Remember, you can get out of your Titan and let it roam on AI mode – meaning there can be 12 Pilots wallrunning around, 12 Titans stomping below, and dozens of AI doing their thing.”

The AI aren’t like bots in other shooters, McCoy adds, noting that the “AI play their own role in the game and are a different class of character in the game.”

So why is this?

Partly it’s because having AI gives players some fodder, allows them to feel a bit god-like at times even when they’re not the most skilled player on the map.

But it’s not just about feeling like a hero. There’s also the fact that matches in Titanfall attempt to tell something of a narrative. According to GameInformer’s Mike Futter, that narrative, which introduces changing story elements to each match as it progresses, “has a meaningful impact on how I perceive the action.”

I’d also suggest that more is not, by any stretch of the imagination, actually better. Some people obviously prefer big matches—Halo or Battlefield for instance—but many excellent shooters often opt for smaller teams. My favorite Counter Strike: Source games were typically no bigger than 24 players and often less. Team Fortress 2 gets by fine with smaller teams.

I wonder if some of the backlash might also be due to the recently released Call of Duty: Ghosts, which also caps its matches at 6 vs. 6. The big maps and low player count can make some Ghosts matches feel empty compared to a game like Black Ops II‘s multiplayer.

But there are not mechs in Ghosts. There is no story element to the maps. It’s an entirely different shooter altogether.

For my part, a lower player count sounds just fine. Killing both PCs and NPCs sounds perfectly okay. If it’s fun and balanced I see no reason why the cap should be any higher (or lower, for that matter.)

And as McCoy notes, “Only a couple months until speculative threads like this are gone and people are actually talking about their experiences with the game.”

The real question isn’t whether or not the player count is ideal, it’s about how the game fares at launch. EA has had some notoriously bad launches of its multiplayer games in recent months, including Battlefield 4. Here’s to hoping that Respawn and their new IP avoid a massive launch controversy, and players walk away happy.

(P.S. I also think it would be cool to have a multiplayer game where one team had mechs and the other had tricked out dinosaurs, but that’s a story for a different time.)

(P.P.S. Since Titanfall does incorporate wall-running / parkour, it would be sort of hilarious to have 64 player matches, with everyone running into one another as they dash across walls…)

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“I wonder if some of the backlash might also be due to the recently released Call of Duty: Ghosts, which also caps its matches at 6 vs. 6″

Current gen only, Erik, and I don’t want to walk around gunning down made-to-be-sucktastic bots in a competitive multiplayer game – ever, which is why bots are so loathed outside of practice, they’re anti-fun.

I’m pretty sure this isn’t the case, though. They’re not filling up teams with bots. They’re adding other elements to the game, AI that enters the match as part of the story, etc. And the Titans, which I don’t think are designed as “sucktastic.”

Well, the addition of bots doesn’t sound horrible to me. One of the things that turns me away from multi-player is being constantly pawned by players who either have more free time then me, more skills, or both. So having some NPCs to beat up on doesn’t sound horrible to me at all.

Are you joking? This isn’t going to be a story based game, you know that, it’s the makers of Call of Duty, these guys are not programming wizards, their history fully establishes that, the bots sound like filler for what they can’t accomplish with their engine.

As I say in the piece, my favorite mutliplayer games tend to have low player counts, so I’m naturally amenable to this thanks to my own preferences.

But I think there’s no golden rule that states I can’t take the side of the developers, or that I must take the opposite side *no matter what.* What they’re saying makes sense to me. We’ll see if it stacks up at launch.

I think you are taking the world “class” the wrong way here. I think he’s saying that they’re not the same “level” as PCs. They’re normal soldiers rather than super-elite Titan pilots. From what I can tell they serve a different purpose, and aren’t part of any match’s “core.” We’ll see.

Sure. They’ll be another type of obstacle, but not sit-ins for core players. It’s not like they’re talking about adding other Pilots as bots here. So you have the “core” teams of 6v6 plus Titans plus secondary opponents who aren’t commanding mechs.

I’m fine with the decision. I think the problem some people have is that they might be thinking of the bots in multiplayer matches as being of the type you’d find filling actual player slots in the game. But since they’re additional backup alongside the regular players, I assume they’re going to have some kind of AI in-line with what you’d see in an FPS campaign.

“amount of stuff happening at once in a map you’ll be hard pressed to find a game that keeps the action higher. I literally have to stop playing every few rounds because my heart just can’t take it some times. Remember, you can get out of your Titan and let it roam on AI mode – meaning there can be 12 Pilots wallrunning around, 12 Titans stomping below, and dozens of AI doing their thing.”

The initial gameplay video showed an exceptionally well paced game making room for both action and story. In the process of damage control they’ve put out a very real reason to be concerned.

6v6 may be absolutely fine, but the outrage proves that everyone had their own expectations of exactly what kind of game they were being sold. I myself, seeing the source engine, had my own expectations dashed by this and the lack of mod tools.

The enormous amount of hype for Titanfall clearly isn’t going to be met by everyone, but I hope it can shake up the AAA FPS genre with some cool new ideas explored by smaller dev teams. I picked up a bunch of indie FPS games during the Steam winter sale and there’s some good stuff out there. It really has me thinking – does the essential ‘call of duty’ mold really have to cost that much?

- My personal interest in Titanfall is going to come down to 3 bad news stories I expect to see in the coming weeks, can’t shake the feeling I’m going to hear all of them… If anyone has news about these please let me know!

1. Lack of a server browser. 6v6 is small enough to naturally lead to matchmaking-only setup, and I’ve never had luck with those. Aside from latency issues, dedicated servers with admins is the only way to prevent rampant cheating, shutting down hate, and generally the best shot at creating a positive multiplayer community.

2. Origin required for PC. If you’ve had luck with this service, great. I’ve bought three games on Origin and every single one has found new ways to screw me over. Performance issues, bugs, issues accessing games, poor customer support, anti-consumer practices (I’m still bitter about the Steam-EA dick fencing, flat out killed momentum for the big BF2142 1.5 patch, the revival of a great game that never happened) I almost can’t believe after 8 years and countless of revisions EA downloader has somehow become _worse_.

3. Playerbase-splitting dlc map packs. It’d be a shame if the worst practices of AAA FPS continue so blindly. I was impressed with RO2′s expansion “Rising Storm”s solution to this, which was to limit players who didn’t buy the expansion to the the level 1 rifleman class on those maps. Maybe Titanfall players can be limited to the crappy bot characters? Hah

Now this is the type of article I would like to see one of these Forbes video-game “contributors” write! But instead, they seem content with writing “fluff” pieces that fail to have any substance or foresight. This article is basically a “dick-in-mouth” piece. The developers came by their “studio” to present their story and Forbes writers simply accept it, or take it, without complaint or speculation.

Now, the bad news is that Origin will probably be here to stay. Anyone who does not have a PC probably doesn’t know about the evils of Origin. But I don’t know if I feel Steam is vastly superior. If anything, Steam gave me just as many issues especially after I had to install new configuration files. But that is a story for another day.

My concern really comes from EA’s involvement with this game. I just can’t help but shake the feeling that some shady business will be involved.

But Respawn had to start somewhere, and I’m sure they needed funding to get this game off the ground – even if they had to sign a deal with the devil to make it happen.

“I wonder if some of the backlash might also be due to the recently released Call of Duty: Ghosts, which also caps its matches at 6 vs. 6. ”

No, the main backlash is because BF3/4 support 64 players in massive environments, and other games are going in that direction so that small unbalances in team skill don’t affect playability as much. If one person of 6 sucks, it’s going to affect you far more than 4 of 24/32.

However, the 6v6 is likely identical because they use the same base netcode, as both are based on the unreal engine. While it is stable, it’s hardly made for massive player controlled pieces like a titan.